The project launched on June 15 when a selection of BT ArtBoxes were on display in Trafalgar Square for the day. From June 18 to July 16, BT ArtBoxes are showcased across London’s streets and landmark locations, such as Covent Garden, St Pancras Station, Carnaby Street, Hyde Park and even the shark tank at the London Aquarium (location map). Then, all the boxes will be auctioned off through eBay and Sotheby’s to raise money for ChildLine’s 25th anniversary (more info). London has hosted similar charity art projects helped by celebrities and creators every now and then, such as the Black Dog Campaign, the Big Egg Hunt, and the Elephant Parade.

Over the past 30 years Patrick Keiller has developed a range of films which combine expressionless images of British landscape, rural and urban, with a narration which draws together wide-ranging literary anecdotes, historical episodes, current affairs, economic critique and offbeat humour. “The Robinson Institute” is inspired by Keiller’s best known films in which his fictional creation – an elusive scholar named Robinson – wanders the English landscape and records his chance encounters on an old cine camera.

The exhibition is the reflection of the British landscape, politics, economics and history and it brings together more than 120 diverse and often surreal artworks and objects from across several centuries. Robinson’s images are shown alongside other artworks, mainly from the Tate’s own collections, as well as works by historians, geographers, cartographers and geologists. The seven-part installation includes renown international artists such as JMW Turner, Andy Warhol, Andreas Gursky, Jackson Pollock and Dennis Oppenheim, together with unusual objects such as meteorite that fell in Yorkshire in 1795 and a parliamentary amendment, as well as Beatrix Potter and clips from the Hammer’s sci-fi horror Quatermass 2.

Individual works are impressive and the choice of works are interesting, but it is not easy to understand the connection between each work and messages behind, for me as a foreigner who don’t know about UK fully. I wish there were an explanation at each part of the installation that helps me understand what it is about (or did I miss it??).

We passed by Hoxton Square today and dropped in 20 Hoxton Square Projects on the north of the square. Launched in 2007, 20 Hoxton Square Projects is a collaborative project space, operating as a platform for emerging contemporary artists. We saw the music and art event Concrete and Glass on its last day (May 13 to 27), and at first, I thought it was another weird but dull ‘contemporary’ art exhibition, but the hidden gems were literally hided in the small rooms on the back of the gallery.

“The Good Old Days” by Clarisse d’Arcimoles is a part of Market Estate Project, taken placed at Market estate, a 571-flats council estate has just been destroyed in Holloway, North London, on the day before its demolition. On March 6, right before the bulldozers moved in, 76 artists transformed the entire estate into a creative playground, and made of the formerly public and private living spaces a rich final memory of the estate, once represented a Utopian vision of modern urban planning in the 1960’s. In this work, d’Arcimoles has taken a portrait of Mr Jimmy Watts, one of the first resident to have moved into the Market estate in 1967 and spent most of his life in the estate until the demolition. Reconstructing memories and his “good old days”, the old man’s former residence filled with 60–70’s kitsch furniture and old photographs (she also made detailed entrance with his hat and coat hanging as well), was so real and touching and made me feel sentimental, though I don’t know anything about him.

SUKI CHAN‘s two-screen video installation, “Sleep Walk Sleep Talk (2009)” is the first commissioned project of Free to Air, a series of exhibitions and events that will extend across London over a four-year period, exploring ideas of freedom of speech and expression in contemporary society. I didn’t see a strong correlation between her work and “freedom of speech and expression”, but London’s office block and fast-blinking lights and speeding commuters at night and the transitory freedoms people find in an urban metropolis after work, projected on two screens, was so stylish and mesmerizing, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the screens. Usually my patience doesn’t last with long video installations, but I saw all of this work without being bored (I am not sure how long, probably 15 min or so – I couldn’t find anywhere how long it is).